


Offside

by sciosophia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Football, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soccer, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, FIFA World Cup 2018, Football | Soccer, Footballer Ben, Footballer Rey, PWP without Porn, Soccer Player Ben, Soccer Player Rey, The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing, needs more football tbh, pretty people kiss and talk about sports, somehow fluffy and sexy?, these nerds are in love and i love it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciosophia/pseuds/sciosophia
Summary: “Go on,” Ben tells her, prodding at the wound he seems to be asking her to open.Tell me the honest truth. I want to know what you think of my game.His voice, now, is soft. If it weren’t public information, she’d never have guessed he has a reputation for a temper. “There’s more to say. So say it.”...or, Ben is the world's most famous soccer player, Rey is the captain of the England women's team, and they are unhelpfully attracted to one another.





	Offside

**Author's Note:**

> I've been tinkering with the idea of a FIFA World Cup AU for the last four weeks, and inspiration kept me waiting until roughly twenty-four hours before the final, leaving me... *checks watch* ...ten minutes to post it before the match began.
> 
> A few notes:  
> \- Rey's British, and so am I, therefore "soccer" is referred to as "football" unless it's in Ben's US vernacular;  
> \- the women's World Cup is also held every four years, taking place one year after the men's;  
> \- this fic is rated _mature_ for a some swearing and the fact this is basically PWP without the actual porn, sorry. Pretty people do kiss, though.
> 
> See notes at the end for a few helpful definitions, etc.  
> .

* * *

 

 **off·side** _(ˈɒfˈsaɪd)_  
_adj, adv.  
_

_in a position illegally ahead of the ball when it is_  
_played, usually within the opponents' half_

_._

 

“Truthfully? Sometimes I don’t like the way you play.”

Ben doesn’t say anything, but Rey thinks she can hear his little intake of breath. What she sees, when she glances sideways, is the way he fiddles with the hem of his top, a deep blue tee with an embroidered _USA_ on one side of the chest, the Nike logo on the other. They’re walking along the bank of the Fontaka river in twilight. It’s late in the evening but the weather in Saint Petersburg is warm, almost 30°C, and both Rey and Ben are bare-armed. His elbow grazes along her skin as they walk.

On reflection she adds, “Maybe that’s not the best way to say it.”

“It’s fine. I told you to be honest.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be—” She tries to think of the word. “Cruel.”

She doesn’t expect Ben to _laugh,_ a gentle huff of air that, when she looks at him, has curled a smile into the corner of his mouth.

“Why’s that funny?”

Ben shakes his head. “Cruel isn’t…you.”

 _You’ve known me for less than a day,_ Rey wants to say; but something in her understands it. Six hours has never felt so much like six days. Or months, maybe. Even years.

 

The thing is, Rey knows Ben too. She’s spent a lifetime watching him on television, as a figure just a few inches high, silhouetted by the green grass of a hundred football pitches. He’s been on posters in adolescent bedrooms and selling Nike trainers on bus-stop hoardings, in magazines and Buzzfeed thirst lists and various Daily Mail exposés—“USA’s brightest soccer star”—“troubled son of a Senator”—“wayward wildchild in fights and brawls”—and on and on and on until the whole world had seen that strange, handsome face of his.

That Ben Solo—Rey knows him well. And she never intended for that to change. Except—

A morning workout first, then breakfast, then travelling to the BBC studio by Krestovsky Stadium, a few hours of prep and a few hours on air critiquing the afternoon match, before coming back and lying on her hotel bed, texting Finn about his boyfriend and his cat, and feeling homesick. That was Russia, the same as it had been for two weeks in a row.

Maybe _sportsick_ was the better word for it; talking about football had felt all well and good—and as a female player, to be invited onto the BBC as a pundit, debating with men she’d idolised as a child, well, that was _amazing—_ but Rey never stops wanting to _play._ 32 appearances for England; nine international goals and seven assists; two hat-tricks to her name at club and international level; five Champions League goals; three club trophies. Last year she was the FA WSL's top scorer and Player of the Year, and Rey is still only 24.

Nevertheless. It’s the off-season, and there are twelve months left until she’ll get to play a World Cup of her own.

“I’m bored,” she’d said out loud to her room, staring at the ceiling. She’d looked to her right, then to her left. Her laundry service ticket had been on the nightstand.

 _Better than nothing at all,_ she’d thought, and rolled off the bed.

Seven floors in the elevator to the laundry service, Rey watching the lights on the interior panel illuminate with each floor. _5, 4, 3, 2, 1, G, -1._

“Hi, hello, I’m here for laundry,” she’d said, sliding the service ticket across the desk. As if there was anything else anyone ever came down here for. The woman had taken it without smiling and disappeared into the back. And then—

“I know you.”

Whirling around, Rey had been telling herself _it’s not_ until she’d turned a full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to find that it was, actually.

Ben Solo, in that dark blue Nike tee, _USA_ logo over his heart. Out of all the hotels in Saint Petersburg, what was he doing in hers?

“You can’t possibly,” Rey had said, sounding more aggressive than she’d meant to.

Ben had nodded, hair falling in his eyes with the movement. He’d brushed it out of the way and Rey had thought, _he looks better in person._

“I do,” he’d replied. “You’re Rey. You play for England.”

 

She’s not even sure how they got so far from the hotel; only that they walked in circles over the city, too wrapped up in the company to notice the path of their feet. They have talked about football for hours, and it’s been wonderful. No big deal that it’s the easiest conversation Rey’s had in months. She loves Finn to pieces, has since they were kids kicking a ball across the same concrete playground, but he’s never quite understood how it went from a being a game to being everything.

“Go on,” Ben tells her, prodding at the wound he seems to be asking her to open. _Tell me the honest truth. I want to know what you think of my game._ His voice, now, is soft. If it weren’t public information, she’d never have guessed he has a reputation for a temper. “There’s more to say. So say it.”

“You’re selfish with the ball,” she blurts out, knowing that if she doesn’t get the words out fast enough she won’t say it at all. “You strike when you should pass and then when somebody takes their own shot you get mad they didn't pass to you.”

She recalls the images like carbon copies, fainter than the real thing but preserved all the same; Ben, one of the greatest in world, forced into mistakes by his own selfishness; shanking easy sitters wide of the goal, hitting the crossbar, sending long passes straight at the opposing keeper. She feels like she’d lose count if she tried to tally the arguments she’s seen play out on telly, Ben gesturing to teammates in an anger so bright it felt like it would seep out of the screen.

Ben laughs again, this one a little more bitter. _Ah, there you are,_ Rey thinks.

“You sound like my uncle.” He scuffs the heel of his left trainer along the ground, kicks at a loose stone. “He’d love you.”

Rey can’t even begin to think of it. When she was younger, in the Women’s U15 team, the other girls had admired David Beckham and Ben Solo. Rey had idolised a guy playing football fifteen years before she was born. Another striker, he’d done what the other two had not yet been able to; won a World Cup.

“Some skinny little drifter with loads of opinions? I doubt it.”

“No, he would. I’ve seen you play, you understand tactics like it’s the easiest thing in the world, that’s why you’re so valuable. Your opinions are fucking _informed._ ”

Something in Rey burns with professional delight at the idea Ben has seen her out there on the field. She’s spent her whole life disliking him— _the image of him,_ she’s realising, at the same time as she’s trying to ignore the sudden butterflies in her gut— _the image which only had sharp edges—_ but the truth of his talent was never deniable. He is one of the greatest footballers in the world.

Vaguely, Rey realises that they’ve stopped walking. Ben is standing with his back to the river, so that the buildings on the other bank halo him in city lights. His expression darkens again, tinged with the bitterness of that last laugh. “My uncle likes informed opinions.”

“Just not…”

“Mine? No.”

He doesn’t need to explain. Everybody knows the story. Luke Skywalker’s glorious appointment as the US men’s coach; World Cup qualification for 2010; the elation that followed; then the dismay. _You’re joking, right? They can’t have left Ben Solo out of their squad?_

Not even Skywalker’s reputation had escaped such a bad tournament untarnished.

“We never agreed on—” Ben stops, fiddles again with the hem of his tee, starts again. “I was never going to play the way he wanted me to. And that meant he could never give me what I needed from a coach.”

He’s looking down now, eyelashes shading the colour of his eyes from her. He looks— _sad,_ Rey realises, and it’s almost intuition to reach out, to brush the tips of her fingers over the spot where his own are tangled in his tee. She isn’t really _thinking;_ it’s just instinct, the same way it is when she angles a shot just right and it bends down to duck under the crossbar.

He startles, and so does she, withdrawing her hand, forming her mouth into an apology— _sorry, I just needed to touch you—_ but before she can say it, he’s chased her fingers with his own and caught them. Now they’re standing in the evening air with their clasped hands at equidistance between them. The air around them seems suddenly still, and Rey finds that she is afraid to move.

Very gently, Ben traces his thumb over the rise and fall of her knuckles. The evening is warm, but Rey shivers.

“We should go back to the hotel,” she says—realises immediately how it sounds when Ben tries to let go, already moving back, expression already closing in. “No, I mean—” and Rey echoes his movement, thumb brushing light over his skin. His hands feel like they have power in them, and suddenly Rey is drunk on all of this. “I meant we should go back to the hotel together.”

He stills. His gaze is sharp. Rey straightens her shoulders and tilts her chin.

“I know you can’t—” _fuck_ “—mess up your routine too much, and it’s late, and god knows you’ll train tomorrow and I have to spend three hours talking about Belgium and Nigeria, but—” _I’d really love it if you didn’t spend tonight alone._

Ben is still considering her, that well-known face of his shaped by a look which she can’t read. She takes in his shoulders, broad and solid, and the arms—god, the _arms—_ exposed by the short sleeves of the tee. His mouth, his eyes, the set to his jaw that works a muscle as he looks at her. All of it familiar, and so long dismissed, and yet suddenly Rey finds that she is hungry for it.

“Are you sure?” he asks at last.

Rey nods. “Yes. I’m sure.”

 

The retrace their steps in silence. They’ve unclasped their hands; too much of an opportunity for anyone walking by with a camera, which, even in the late evening, is everyone. Rey finds that she’s keeping her hands almost unnaturally stiff at her sides, hyperaware of the way Ben is walking closer than before. Oh, how carefree she’d been when the consequences of today hadn't been about to break over her like a wave.

The back of the hotel looms out of the gloam.

“This way.” Ben tilts his head towards a door tucked into the back. “They gave me a key card.” He doesn't say why, but Rey, who has seen the twenty-four scrutiny of a tournament for herself, doesn't need to ask.

Rey follows Ben through the service corridor, free of decor and lined with carts, loaded and ready to clean the hundreds of rooms stacked above their heads; then through a door into a hallway proper, lined with first floor bedrooms, and finally into the empty lift.

Ben reaches out to the press the button for the tenth floor, then hesitates. Rey reaches across and presses it for him.

His room is at the far end of the hallway, where Rey can tell that the window will look out to sea over the Gulf of Finland. Ben slides his room key through the reader. It doesn’t work. Rey realises on his second attempt that it’s because his hands are shaking.

He turns on one of the lamps, stopping in the doorway so that Rey has to wait a moment behind the broad expanse of his back. She’s so close she catches the scent of laundry detergent, fresh and summery. She’d been expecting something— _else,_ an aftershave, maybe, musky and masculine, or just plain sweat; but she likes this better. Like he really is a new person, full of potential now that he’s separate to the image she’s always carried in her head.

He throws his key card onto the desk without looking at Rey. In fact, now that she’s here, closing the door behind her, he seems keen not to look at her at all. She watches as he bends down to the little fridge beneath the desk, opening it and removing a bottle of water, placing it on the floor. In the reflected light she can see where his hand-print has wiped away the condensation.

Finally, he looks up at her. His jaw is set in that way again. It makes him look _—intense,_ Rey thinks.

“Do you want some—” He looks back into the fridge. “I only have water.”

“Water’s fine.”

He brings her a bottle, then retreats. It’s cold when she takes it, condensation damp against her fingers. She twists the cap and the noise is overly loud in the silence, cracking against her ear like a whip. She takes a sip, tries to swallow down the shake of her limbs with it.

The curtains are open on the big, wide window. The sun hasn’t quite set, leaving everything brushed in the desaturating blue-grey of late dusk, and the room, haf-lift by the soft glow of the lamp, is starting to reflect in the glass. Rey can see Ben standing across from her. She’s watching his reflection; can tell from it that the real Ben is looking straight at the real her.

“You’ve really seen me play?” she asks the reflection in the window.

It nods. “I wouldn’t lie about it.”

“No, of course. It’s just—it’s not common, for—”

A pause.

“For the men to watch the women?”

Rey turns at that, addresses the real Ben. “You don’t grow up knowing us the way we grow up knowing you.”

He sips at his bottle of water; thinks. “No, that’s true. I’m pretty sure none of the assholes on my team could name any NWSL player.” _Those assholes would be the entire US men’s soccer team,_ Rey thinks. So much for national unity. “But—I don't get why they fucking care so much about who they're watching. It shouldn't matter, as long as the game’s good.”

She turns away from the window, looks over her shoulder. Ben is holding the water bottle in one hand, palm so large around it that it’s mostly invisible. With the other he’s tracing lines out of the condensation. He’s looked down now, watching his own work.

“Was I was playing for England?” she asks.

“Yes. It was that summer, when I was injured—” and he gestures to his leg, where the world knows the tibia was snapped in a bad tackle and got plated back together again, “—and I couldn’t train or leave my house so I watched the entire tournament.” He looks back up at Rey. “Once I’d seen you play, I was never going to forget it.”

 _You can’t just look at me like that and say those things,_ she wants to tell him, because his gaze is fierce, filled with a weight she can’t fathom, knowing only that it makes her shiver again; amplified, now, like a vibration that’s singing right through her. It’s telling her to move, to be _close;_ but she can’t quite find the bravery to do it, not yet. Rey feels as though, if she moved now, she’d start falling and never get back up.

She screws the cap back on to her water bottle and does the only thing her brain supplies her with in that moment; throws it to him, a gentle underarm lob, and says, “Come on, then.”

The surprise widens his eyes—god, eyes like that should be illegal—but of course he has the reflexes of a million-dollar striker. He catches the bottle across its cylinder with the toe of his right shoe, somehow finds its balance, then sends it back up into the air once, twice, catches it once, twice, swaps it to his right foot and back again. He kicks it up into the air one last time and grabs it with his free hand.

He grins. Rey looks at him and thinks, _please, please smile more._

“Your turn?”

Rey nods. Ben throws the bottle back to her, and she does the same, catching it on the toe of her trainer, heart joyful at playing  _keepie-uppies_ like she's a kid again, using a half-deflated ball from the primary school sports cupboard. It’s a reflex borne out of some deep-buried instinct, the same kind that lets her calculate the exact right spot to hit a ball with the exact right part of her foot to send it into the exact right part of the net. It’s as easy as breathing.

She kicks it back up into the air, catches it on the front of her other foot; then back up again, higher this time, over her head, so that she can catch it in the curving back of her ankle. It lands, wobbles a little; Rey puts her arms out to balance herself, looks over her shoulder to watch the bottle as it thinks about whether to crash to the floor. It rests precariously, water sloshing about inside it, but doesn’t fall.

Rey grins— _a-ha!—_ then, as she looks up, catches her reflection in that wide window; one foot on the floor, the other raised up, perpendicular behind her, arms out like she’s a child playing _aeroplanes._ She catches Ben’s eye in the reflection; a moment, and then both of them are laughing, Ben’s deep voice bending into something resonant and pleasing underneath her own higher, songful laugh.

The movement of her diaphragm affects her balance, and she falters; the bottle finally rolls off her ankle and onto the floor, landing with a dull thud as Rey puts her foot back down, stability compromised enough that she sways to the side. Ben is in front of her before she’s really had time to consider it, grabbing her arms to keep her from falling, hands wrapped around her elbow joints so that she does the same to his forearms without really thinking about it.

Suddenly she is back on balance and they are no longer ten feet apart. He’s so tall that she has to tilt her chin way up to look at him. His eyes are travelling her features; most of the laughter has been wiped from his own by the same intense look that has terrified other players and, as recently as a moment ago, had fluttered along her spine. Now there’s something— _softer—_ curled into it.

His thumb brushes the delicate skin on the inside of her elbow. Rey wonders if he’s waiting for something. She nods, just the smallest inclination of her head. _Yes. Please. It’s okay._

Ben’s lips are soft and full, cold from the water he’s been drinking. It’s gentle, like he isn’t six-foot-plus of hard muscle and miscellaneous temperament, like his fingers aren’t digging into her arms with increasing pressure as he sighs into her mouth. Rey presses back, parts her lips, tilts her head into it. Yes, _hunger_ was the right word for this.

The chasteness of it starts to recede, and he lets go of her arms, slides his hands up to her shoulders and then down to her waist, to pull her in close so that suddenly he is _everywhere_.  Rey leans into it (into him), coasts her hands up, up, over the delightful cut of his muscles— _biceps, deltoids, trapezius—_ until she can twist her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck. She runs her tongue over that full bottom lip, over the edges of his teeth, and his sigh becomes a groan, reverberating through her, right to where she needs it most. His hands are burning through her shirt, through the worn fabric of her jeans where his palms have moved to grip her hips. If Rey just moved her own hands down, she could slip them under that hem, the one he’s been fiddling with all evening, could lift this stupid tee up and over his head—

But she can’t. He’s in the middle of a tournament, the biggest of his life, is held to a strictly calculated routine with one single destination in mind; that trophy. He’s spent his entire life in the public eye, in _Rey’s_ eyes. Everyone on the planet knows this is the moment his whole life has been building towards.

She moves her hands to his shoulders, pushes back gently. Their lips part.

“Ben.”

He rests his head against hers, eyes still closed, breathing heavy. She and Ben are still flush with one another, fitted into each other’s bodies like jigsaw pieces. Their mouths feel like the only place where they aren’t touching right now.

“I know,” he breathes. “I know.”

“I meant it, though.”

He strokes her hip through her jeans. Rey tries not to tremble. “Meant what?”

She can’t remember now if she’d even said it out loud, out there on the banks of the river, and it tumbles over all the other things she’d like to say him; how she’d like to shove him backwards onto that comfy-looking bed, how she’s sorry that she used to tell people he was toxic to the sport and she hoped she never had the displeasure of meeting him, how she was selfish enough to change her mind only when Ben knew who she was, when that boosted her ego and made her feel good. How she is rapidly realising that she didn’t need to take any steps to fall and never get back up.

“I meant that I don’t have to go, just because we can’t—” _fuck_ “—disrupt your routine. I’m not—” and she casts around for the word again. “I’m not going anywhere. If you don’t want me to.”

Finally he opens his eyes; not wide, still hooded with what Rey can be confident is lust, but under that is something else, something she can’t name. Unbidden, her pop culture history of Ben Solo swirls around in the back of her mind; that broken home, that lonely childhood. Her heart squeezes, and Rey wonders if she’s wearing that same look, that same history, on her own face right now.

She tilts her lips up to his, kisses him softly and slowly, sweetly; breaks away and looks at him.

“You don’t have to be alone tonight,” she says; means _ever again._

He moves his head back a little, perhaps to look at her properly; one of his hands comes up to cup her jaw, her cheek.  

“Neither do you.”

 

It feels odd and delicious, to spend longer than she can keep track of just kissing like teenagers. The linen was still crisply tucked in when they landed on the bed, but now it’s crinkled and rucked up with the way they’ve moved, leisurely and languidly, drunk on each other.

Rey is listening to Ben’s heartbeat, gathered into his side, his arm at her back, hers thrown across him so that it’s her turn to fiddle with that god-damned hem. They’ve turned off the lamps; now that the room is dark and dusk has turned into night, they can see the lights of ships in the Gulf below.

“I haven’t changed my mind,” she says into the quiet.

Ben hums; she can feel it through his chest. He sounds half-asleep when he asks, “About what?”

“About the way you play.”

Now it’s laughter that reverberates through her cheek.

“I don’t mind. You’re right.”

He pulls her closer. Rey shifts, tangles her legs up with his. As she does, she slants her head up to look at him. Ben’s eyes are closed. Like this, he looks impossibly young, as peaceful as she’s ever known. She wonders how many people have seen him like this.

She tucks her head back into the curve of his shoulder, into the angle of his chest. “You can start fixing it tomorrow, then.”

She feels him nod. “And every day after that, if you like.”

The meaning of it hangs in the air, a promise of something. Even half-asleep, she feels him tense a little at his own words.

Rey smoothes out the little emblem stitched into the hem of the t-shirt, a tiny _USA_ label to match the crest above Ben’s heart. The junctures of the next few years swirl around her; this World Cup, and then next year her own; domestic football for both of them; UEFA and CONCACAF; the press, the public, the emotional messes of their own separate lives.

“I’ll be there,” she says; feels the incremental tension in him dissolve; some of her own, too.

Ben somehow finds a way to hold her closer. “After—” he begins, leaves her unsure as to what kind of _after_ he means. Tomorrow, next game, next tournament. “After, when there’s less—” _stuff,_ Rey thinks, “less of everything; we can talk.”

Rey breathes in, slow and steady; smells the fresh, clean scent of his laundered clothes again, layered now with something more; with _her,_ she realises, with the soap she uses after the gym.

 _We’ll figure it out_ , she wants to tell him, but there are too many feelings in her throat, tightening it unexpectedly; so instead she closes her eyes and leans in; dreams of freshly cut grass and football shirts.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [FA WSL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FA_Women%27s_Super_League) \- Football Association Women's Super League (England).
> 
> [NWSL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Women%27s_Soccer_League) \- National Women's Soccer League (USA).
> 
> [US Soccer men's tee](https://store.ussoccer.com/en-us/Mens-Nike-USA-Ringer-Tee-Midnight-Navy).
> 
> [Keepie_uppies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keepie_uppie).
> 
> [UEFA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA).
> 
> [CONCACAF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONCACAF).
> 
> [ **tumblr moodboard for this fic!** ](https://sciosophia.tumblr.com/post/175918692050/offside-go-on-ben-tells-her-prodding-at-the)


End file.
